Lester: The Official Biography Page 25

  The win looked easy. "It wasn't, really," Lester says.

  From York to Ireland for the Phoenix Champion Stakes. Commanche Run was feeling all right that day and won easily without problems. Lester was most impressed with him, as the going was soft. As a three-year-old, the bay colt won twice on very hard ground which it was supposed he liked best. "To be able to gallop as well as he did in the soft ground, he had to be an exceptional horse. So few good horses can act on both."

  There was a good deal of excitement after that race as the three respective racecourses had jointly offered a ;E1,000,000 bonus to any horse winning all three of the Benson and Hedges, the Phoenix Park and the Newmarket Dubai Champion Stakes. With two down and one to go, Commanche Run really looked as if the treble were possible. The million possibility had been covered by insurers whose cheque in good faith was on show at the three race meetings. After Ireland, they were definitely anxious!

  Alas for the Midas hopes. By the time the Dubai Champion Stakes came around at Newmarket in October, Commanche Run, who liked warm weather, had gone over the top, and never troubled the first and second, the One Thousand Guineas winner Pebbles, and the Derby winner Slip Anchor.

  It was Commanche Run's last race: there was to be no great Indian Summer. He stands now at stud at John Magnier's Coolmore Stud in Co. Tipperary.

  At the end of 1984, Lester and Henry Cecil had regretfully come to the end of their partnership. They had both wanted and intended it to last until Lester's retirement, but the dissolution was brought about a year early because of Daniel Wildenstein's continuing refusal to have Lester ride his horses. (The owner who pays the bills has the right to decide.)

  When Daniel Wildenstein had said, "Eddery shall never ride for me again," his then trainer Peter Walwyn had replied that in that case he wouldn't be able to train the Wildenstein horses, and asked for them to leave. Henry Cecil didn't feel he could do that to an owner who had entrusted to him more than twenty good horses. He was, however, finding it very irksome always having to seek out and engage other jockeys whenever the Wildenstein horses ran. "A nightmare," he said.

  He had intended anyway to ask Steve Cauthen to take Lester's place after he retired and, for the sake of Daniel Wildenstein, brought this plan forward a year. Lester went back to freelancing, and Steve Cauthen moved from Barry Hills to Henry Cecil, from Lambourn to Newmarket.

  Daniel Wildenstein rewarded Henry Cecil for his loyalty by announcing, in Derby week 1985, that he was taking all his horses away anyway, as he thought he'd like to have them trained in France. An odd business, loyalty.

  Lester announced in the spring of 1985 that that would be his last season, and Edward Gillespie, manager of Cheltenham racecourse, came up with the brilliant idea of arranging a match race between the two retiring jockey superstars, Lester and jump racing's long-time champion, John Francome.

  The race was to be on the Flat, and to be called the Walton Hall Duel of the Champions. The place, Warwick racecourse; the date, Saturday 18 May, the time 7.45 p.m.-during the normal evening jump-racing programme.

  Warwick racecourse had never seen anything like it. The capacious car parks filled and overspilled and shut their gates. When I arrived just after the first race, the nearest kerbside spot I could find in the crowded surrounding streets was over half a mile from the action.

  The stands were packed, people seeming to be hanging out of the balconies from the press of those behind. More people, on the ground, lined the paddock rails three deep. And all this on a dreadful day of dark clouds, heavy showers, rough wind and diving temperatures. November weather; no fine light warm May evening.

  John Francome, six weeks after hanging up the seven-league boots in which he had jumped his way into folklore, John Francome with his curls, his huge grin, his unmistakable voice and his megawatt personality was already there, spreading light.

  Lester was to come by helicopter from Coventry airport, having flown there after riding in Ireland that afternoon. The buzz went round that he had been delayed and hadn't arrived, and instinctively everyone looked at the sky, a tempest-tossed jumble of clouds black enough to deter the most resolute pilot. Loudspeakers announced the race would be put back half an hour, to give him more time.

  It poured. Everyone huddled in inadequate shelters, shivering, pulling padded jackets close. The evening's regular races damply proceeded, and eventually the drenching shower passed.

  A scant hour before the postponed match time, the brave helicopter swept in below the clouds and landed in the centre of the course, and there Lester was, to everyone's great relief, walking composedly across the track, light, neat, a comet with a tail of running children.

  Spirits rose. More rain fell. By 8.15 p.m., the light was so bad they would have drawn stumps at Lords ten times over.

  Lester rode The Liquidator, John, Shangoseer. Lester's mount at 10 st. 2 lb. had been set to carry 10 lb. less than John's. They had been handicapped by computer.

  The rain stopped again, just in time. The wet crowd emerged from under the overhangs of roofs, and the jockeys, Lester in silk, John in wool, paraded their mounts past the enthusiastic stands. The bookmakers had made The Liquidator favourite; no disrespect to John. The race started in front of the paddock, so that everyone could see. The distance ahead, 13/4 miles, 180 yards. John Francome set off fast, knowing it was probably his only chance, but Lester within the first quarter mile caught and passed him.

  All round the track they went in the same order, with never much more than a length between them. Round the final bend, John, driving Shangoseer hard, closed the gap to half a length, his horse's nose at Lester's saddle. The crowd roared. John used his whip. Lester sat dead still. It looked for a moment as if John might prevail, but The Liquidator kept right on going. His winning margin, three-quarters of a length, had been unchanged all along the straight.

  To many, Lester's win as usual looked easy, but it hadn't been. He told me afterwards that he'd had to lead almost from the beginning because The Liquidator, once headed, tended to lose interest and stop. "I knew if John caught up with me again it would be all over. I had to sit there and just keep my horse going. I couldn't ride him any harder, he wouldn't have liked it. If I'd used my whip, he would have stopped. He couldn't go any faster. It was a close thing, really."

  The 10-lb. advantage in weight had very likely proved the decisive factor, and it was the computer, one might say, who took the prize.

  With wet hair, wet clothes and smiles to shame the sun, the great satisfied crowd drifted home. Rain or not, it had been, like Agincourt, a battle not to be missed.

  Two weeks before the Warwick race, Lester had ridden in his last Two Thousand Guineas. He had been going to ride Luca Cumani's Bairn, on whom he had decisively won the preliminary Greenham Stakes at Newbury, but at the last minute these plans were changed.

  Bairn was owned by Sheikh Mohammed. His elder brother, Sheikh Maktoum al Maktoum, also had a runner in the race; Shadeed, trained by Michael Stoute. Eleven days before the Two Thousand Guineas, Shadeed's usual jockey, Walter Swinburn, was involved in an incident in the Blue Riband Stakes at Epsom, in which it was judged that in finishing second he had interfered with the horse which finished fourth.

  To the consternation of the stable, Walter Swinburn wasn't just disqualified from second place but was given a three-week suspension. Against this harsh sentence (uncomfortably reminiscent again of the slap-down-the-young-star syndrome), trainer and jockey appealed. (They appealed also against a different suspension later in the year and got the sentence then increased.)

  The Blue Riband appeal was turned down, and Shadeed was without a jockey. Lester was engaged to ride Bairn, but there's a tradition amongst Arabs that the older brother has preference. The younger must give the elder whatever he wants.

  Maktoum al Maktoum exercised this right and chose to have Lester on his horse, the younger brother yielding him up as a matter of course. Luca Cumani, resigned, engaged Willie Carson for Bairn. Lester took the switch
philosophically as he didn't mind which of the horses he rode. He had seen Shadeed win the Craven Stakes and thought him brilliant.

  The Two Thousand Guineas is always a hard race, and Shadeed, Lester says, was never going as well as he had in the Craven. Lester feared he would be beaten, and beaten moreover by Bairn, who had been slowly away from the gate but was uncomfortably close with Willie Carson scenting victory. In another of those rocketting finishes, entirely in tune with his horse, Lester won on Shadeed by a head.

  "It was lucky for me," he says, grinning. Lucky too for Michael Stoute and the elder Maktoum. Lester won't have it that he would have won on Bairn anyway if he hadn't been switched to Shadeed, but he's fairly alone in that opinion. Winning the Two Thousand Guineas put his classic record up another notch to twenty-nine, and that's where it will stand now for perhaps another 157 years, or indeed for ever.

  The final tally of English classic wins is:

  Two Thousand Guineas

  Crepello, 1957

  Sir Ivor, 1968

  Nijinsky, 1970

  Shadeed,1985

  One Thousand Guineas

  Humble Duty, 1970

  Fairy Footsteps, 1981

  Oaks Carrozza, 1957

  Petite Etoile, 1959

  Valoris, 1966

  Juliette Marny, 1975

  Blue Wind, 1981

  Circus Plume, 1984

  Derby

  Never Say Die, 1954

  Crepello, 1957

  St. Paddy, 1960

  Sir Ivor, 1968

  Nijinsky, 1970

  Roberto, 1972

  Empery, 1976

  The Minstrel, 1977

  Teenoso, 1983

  St. Leger

  St. Paddy,1960

  Aurelius, 1961

  Ribocco,1967

  Ribero,1968

  Nijinsky, 1970

  Athens Wood, 1971

  Boucher, 1972

  Commanche Run, 1984

  Lester won one more classic in his last season, the French Oaks on Lypharita.

  Throughout the whole of the summer, he rode as much in France as in England, actually winning more races there than at home.

  Everywhere he went, there were the "last" races to be ridden. The last Derby, the last time at The Curragh, the final chance at the Arc. Everywhere too there were presentations and speeches, and not only in England but in Ireland, Sweden, Italy and France.

  There were cheers and champagne and damp eyes: photographs of Lester and Vincent with their arms round each other's shoulders; a procession of thanksgiving for joys present and past. No one wanted him to finish, and everyone knew that he must.

  Nottingham racecourse invited him to go there on 29 October for his last day's racing in England, and put on a special programme to do him honour. A hundred or more telegrams arrived for him there on the day, one notably from the Queen Mother wishing him good fortune and saying how much he would be missed.

  Lester came by helicopter with Maureen and Tracy: Susan had to be on business at a bloodstock sale.

  The huge crowd, positively willing him to ride a winner, had to wait only until the second race. Then Full Choke, which just about described the state of half the onlookers' throats, triumphantly took him past the post, and for the last time in England the hats came off and the cheers rang out. He rode three more races, second, eighth and again second; and quite suddenly it was all over. Nothing in English racing would be the same, ever again.

  Nottingham racecourse designed a special racecard for the event, with a portrait of Lester on the front. People beseiged him all afternoon for autographs, waiting patiently in hundreds for the famous scrawl. One of the cards that he and a number of his fellow jockeys signed was for exjump-jockey turned expert commentator, Richard Pitman. A month later, Richard generously gave his racecard to be auctioned to raise money for Children in Need. Those few sheets of paper were sold for £ 1100, an eloquent tribute to Lester's stature in history.

  Nottingham wasn't entirely the end of the road. The foreign travels continued, with races ridden and won in America later in the autumn, and spring in the Far East still beckoning with promise. It seemed as if Lester wanted no sudden cut-off, as if he would go on riding sporadically with no ending in mind, until one day, looking back, he could see that that race, there, had been the last. As if he didn't want to know it was finally over until after it was.

  By December 1985, his spacious stables in Hamilton Road, Newmarket-Eve Lodge-were alive and bustling with yearlings, the dying fall of one career revitalising like the phoenix into a new incarnation. Lester the jockey was going, Lester the trainer arriving: he looked forward to the new life with zest.

  It would take two years, he said, to wind up to full pitch. In his first season, all the yearlings would be running as two-year-olds, in the next season at three, and thereafter the crops would rotate smoothly. He has room for a hundred horses in the substantial main stable blocks which are built on the barn system under huge sheltering roofs. Accommodation for another forty is available next door, when needed.

  Successions of tenants disclosed the need for slight modifications to the original design, and during the summer of 1985 building work pro gressed to prepare the yard as a modern, efficient, thoroughly high-standard establishment ready to take on the world.

  Great jockeys don't automatically make great trainers, but Lester has two prime advantages: first, that as the son of a trainer he's known the job from birth, and second, that he's married to someone who knows what's needed at least as well as he does. Susan, assistant trainer at sixteen: Susan, bloodstock agent. She knows the necessary organisation like the alphabet.

  Lester continues to ride work in the mornings, assessing his charges' readiness from the saddle. The insights he gave to other trainers about their horses he applies now to his own.

  He expects jockeys who ride for him to report fully, as he used to himself. He never could understand trainers who wouldn't listen to details of how their horses had run.

  "Didn't want to hear the worst, I suppose!"

  I have read speculations that Lester won't succeed as a trainer because he can't "blarney" the owners.

  Quite right. Lester believes his owners deserve better than blarney.

  They'll get the truth.

  -

  25 The Man Inside The Myth

  THE public's perception of Lester Piggott as a jockey was always unerringly accurate. They saw the dash, the balance, the courage, the judgment and the searing finishes. They understood the compulsion to win and the troubles it led to. They expected honesty, a run for their money, a hard man in the saddle. They laid out their cash on those qualities from the time he was twelve.

  He gave them fair return. Except at the very beginning when, as he says, "If you wanted rides, you did as you were told", he was impervious to instructions or inducements not to win. It was axiomatic among trainers that if you wanted a race lost by the jockey, you didn't engage L. Piggott. If you wanted it won-totally different matter.

  The public are not fools. They approved of Lester. They ignored damaging criticism.

  They saw their man clearly, and extended to him a durable affection of such power that the vocal expression of it at race meetings towards the end of his last season brought him very close to tears.

  The public's perception of Lester's off-track personality has always been dependent on the Press, and the Press's perception has too often been wrong. This isn't necessarily the journalists' fault. They have been trying for decades to extract from an introvert all sorts of personal revelations which he is unwilling and probably unable to give.

  Reading through press cuttings in bulk for this book, I have been struck by the amount of awe expressed by the sports-writers, by the admiration, the informed praise and the generous celebration of genius.

  But also there's an undercurrent from some of them sometimes of semi-stifled malice, of pique that Lester wouldn't dance to their tune, of sly pleasure taken in his discomfitures. They
were getting back at him, one supposes, for his refusal to talk to them when they wanted him to. Lester at the races was working, had his mind on what he was doing, and didn't care for interruptions.

  The effort involved in Lester's listening to questions out in the noisy open air has always been underestimated. Often he didn't answer pressmen's questions because he didn't know what they were asking. If they spoke to the side or back of his head, he didn't know they were there. The pause between asking Lester something and receiving a reply is often taken up by his sorting out unfamiliar lip movements into words. Some cynics think he can always hear if he wants to, but he can't: he couldn't, for instance, hear the Queen wish him a good race in the paddock at Ascot.

  To Lester, what was written about him as a jockey was simply part of the job. He took it for granted that newspapers would print what they liked. He neither thanked them for their compliments nor complained of their criticism. He shrugged when they got facts wrong, and he didn't put them right. Few sportsmen have had to stand up to such ruthless and relentless dissection, but Lester takes it in his stride.